Tshivhula clan names and clan praises

Tshivhula in the sources

Tshivhula is, in E. Mudau’s account, the khosikhulu of the Vhangona (Ngona) who ruled the land to which Hwami’s people moved, and who later fled west to the Blouberg and acknowledged Dimbanyika’s supremacy. Lufuno Mulaudzi notes that no other scholar calls Tshivhula a Vhangona ruler: he is commonly known today as a Mutwanamba, from the Twanamba community.

What the sources say

Mudau says that Hwami’s people left the Kwinda land for Tshivhula’s because Tshivhula’s people feared the sacred drum, and that the Vhangona had their own khosikhulu, Tshivhula, who had conquered some other small vhuhosi, such as the Vhalembethu led by Mutale; Mudau also says Munzhedzi (Mpofu) later conquered the Tshivhula and Raphulu people (ch. 3, pp. 55 to 56, 65). Mulaudzi remarks that neither Nemudzivhadi nor Ralushai calls Tshivhula the Ngona chief, and that the Tshivhula people never set up a claim to the Venda kingship before the commissions (note 20, p. 55).

The identification with the Twanamba matters for our directory, which has a page on the Vhatwanamba, whom Wikipedia counts among the Karanga-Rodzvi later arrivals and community blogs among the Vhangona. Mulaudzi’s note suggests another view, that Tshivhula’s people were Twanamba. See Hwami and Raphulu.

Cautions

The position of Tshivhula is disputed and rests on a single informant. This is early oral history, collected by a government ethnologist from a handful of Venda informants in the 1930s, read critically by a historian in 2020. The informants contradict one another on names, order and relationships, and Mulaudzi says so and weighs them; he also gives his own judgements. The extracted text of his thesis has stray spaces and unreadable characters, so page numbers are approximate. We are not printing details of sacred objects or sites. Venda early history is told differently by each narrator, and where they differ we say so and take no side.

Sources and further reading

• Lufuno J. P. Mulaudzi, “Historicising the politics of vhuhosivhuhulu: the Venda polity and state formation in South Africa, c.1800s-2020”, DPhil thesis, University of Pretoria (2020), chapter 3, “Early history and the contestation of the Venda vhuhosivhuhulu until the early 1800s”, citing the contributions of E. Mudau, S. M. Dzivhani, O. S. Radzilani, M. M. Motenda and J. M. Mugivhi to N. J. van Warmelo, The Copper Miners of Musina and the Early History of the Zoutpansberg (1940), and the work of M. H. Nemudzivhadi

See also Masingo, Vhangona and Dimbanyika.

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